The present invention relates to a device for applying a histological section which can be generated on a blade of a microtome to a slide.
Microtomes have been known for a long time from the prior art. Thin histological sections of tissue samples embedded in paraffin are produced with them. One histological section each is applied to a slide. The slides with the histological sections are usually subjected to a further treatment, the histological sections being stained by means of a staining method in order to be finally observed with the microscope.
When a thin histological section has been prepared with the microtome, it is usually manually placed by the operator in a heated water bath. Merely exemplarily, reference is made to the document DE 203 05 494 U1 from which this proceeding at a correspondingly designed microtome is known. In the water bath the histological section experiences a stretching and smoothing so that it does not show any folds, waves or other forms of unevenness. Afterwards, the operator manually picks up the histological section swimming on the water surface of the water bath on a slide in that a part of the slide is positioned below the water surface under a suitable angle and is brought closer to the histological section swimming on the water surface, which is finally placed on the slide. When proceeding like this, there is the risk of a contamination of the water bath and thus of the various histological sections which swim in the water bath one after the other. For avoiding such contamination the water bath would often have to be replaced. Moreover, this proceeding requires considerable skill of the operator in order to guarantee a constant quality standard of the preparation or, respectively, during the application of the histological section to the slide.
An alternative approach provides that a so-called adhesive tape is manually applied to the tissue block to be cut prior to the preparation of the histological section. As a result thereof, compression or tearing of the histological section during the cutting operation is prevented. The adhesive tape with the histological section is then applied to the slide with the histological section side. Under the effect of UV light, the adhesive bond between the adhesive tape and the histological section is dissolved so that only the histological section is applied to the slide or, respectively remains on the slide. This application operation, too, involves high manual expense and requires a post-treatment by UV light. In addition, only after removing the adhesive tape, the quality of the histological section can be assessed.
Further, the document DE 20 28 898 discloses a device for the automatic removal of a histological section from a blade of a microtome.